Book Description

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and a finalist for the National Book Award!

From the PEN/Hemingway Award-winning author of the critically acclaimed short story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, comes Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk ("The Catch-22 of the Iraq War" —Karl Marlantes).

A razor-sharp satire set in Texas during America's war in Iraq, it explores the gaping national disconnect between the war at home and the war abroad.

Ben Fountain’s remarkable debut novel follows the surviving members of the heroic Bravo Squad through one exhausting stop in their media-intensive "Victory Tour" at Texas Stadium, football mecca of the Dallas Cowboys, their fans, promoters, and cheerleaders.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and a finalist for the National Book Award!

From the PEN/Hemingway Award-winning author of the critically acclaimed short story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, comes Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk ("The Catch-22 of the Iraq War" —Karl Marlantes).

A razor-sharp satire set in Texas during America's war in Iraq, it explores the gaping national disconnect between the war at home and the war abroad.

Ben Fountain’s remarkable debut novel follows the surviving members of the heroic Bravo Squad through one exhausting stop in their media-intensive "Victory Tour" at Texas Stadium, football mecca of the Dallas Cowboys, their fans, promoters, and cheerleaders.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, May 2012: Billy Lynn and his Bravo squad mates have become heroes thanks to an embedded Fox News crew’s footage of their firefight against Iraqi insurgents. During one day of their bizarre Victory Tour, set mostly at a Thanksgiving Day football game at Texas Stadium, they’re wooed by Hollywood producers, smitten by Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, and share a stage at halftime with Beyonce. Guzzling Jack and Cokes and scuffling with fans, the Bravos are conflicted soldiers. “Okay, so maybe they aren’t the greatest generation,” writes debut author (!) Ben Fountain, who manages a sly feat: giving us a maddening and believable cast of characters who make us feel what it must be like to go to war. Veering from euphoria to dread to hope, Billy Lynn is a propulsive story that feels real and true. With fierce and fearless writing, Fountain is a writer worth every accolade about to come his way. --Neal Thompson

Review

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is not merely good; it’s Pulitzer Prize-quality good . . . A bracing, fearless and uproarious satire of how contemporary war is waged and sold to the American public.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

“[An] inspired, blistering war novel…Though it covers only a few hours, the book is a gripping, eloquent provocation. Class, privilege, power, politics, sex, commerce and the life-or-death dynamics of battle all figure in Billy Lynn’s surreal game day experience.” (New York Times)

“A masterful echo of ‘Catch-22,’ with war in Iraq at the center. …a gut-punch of a debut novel…There’s hardly a false note, or even a slightly off-pitch one, in Fountain’s sympathetic, damning and structurally ambitious novel.” (Washington Post)

“Fountain’s excellent first novel follows a group of soldiers at a Dallas Cowboys game on Thanksgiving Day…Through the eyes of the titular soldier, Fountain creates a minutely observed portrait of a society with woefully misplaced priorities. [Fountain has] a pitch-perfect ear for American talk…” (The New Yorker)

“Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is a big one. This is the brush-clearing Bush book we’ve been waiting for.” (Harper's Magazine)

“For Memorial Day why not turn to a biting, thoughtful, and absolutely spot-on new novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk…This postmodern swirl of inner substance, yellow ribbons, and good(ish) intentions is at the core of Ben Fountain’s brilliant Bush-era novel.” (The Daily Beast)

“A brilliantly conceived first novel . . . The irony, sorrow, anger and examples of cognitive dissonance that suffuse this novel make it one of the most moving and remarkable novels I’ve ever read.” (Nancy Pearl, NPR, Morning Edition)

“Seething, brutally funny…[Fountain] leaves readers with a fully realized band of brothers…Fountain’s readers will never look at an NFL Sunday, or at America, in quite the same way.” (Sports Illustrated)

“The Iraq war hasn’t yet had its Catch-22 or Slaughterhouse-Five, but Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is a contender… A wicked sense of humor, wonderful writing and, beneath the anger and outrage, a generous heart.” (Tampa Bay Times)

“It’s a darkly humorous satire about the war at home, absurd and believable at the same time.” (Esquire)

“Darkly comic…Rarely does such a ruminative novel close with such momentum.” (Los Angeles Times)

“Fountain’s strength as a writer is that he not only can conjure up this all-too-realistic-sounding mob, but also the young believably innocent soul for our times, Specialist Billy Lynn. And from the first page I found myself rooting for him, often from the edge of my seat.” (Minneapolis Star Tribune)

“[T]he Catch-22 of the Iraq War....Fountain applies the heat of his wicked sense of humor while you face the truth of who we have become. Live one day inside Billy Lynn’s head and you’ll never again see our soldiers or America in the same way.” (Karl Marlantes, bestselling author of Matterhorn)

“Ben Fountain stormed to the front lines of American fiction when he published his astonishing...Brief Encounters with Che Guevara. His first novel will raise his stature and add to his splendid reputation. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is both hilarious and heartbreaking.” (Pat Conroy)

“Fountain is the Pen/Hemingway Award winner of the bristly and satisfying Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, so I expect lots from this book.” (Barbara's Picks, Library Journal)

“Ben Fountain’s Halftime is as close to the Great American Novel as anyone is likely to come these daysan extraordinary work that captures and releases the unquiet spirit of our age, and will probably be remembered as one of the important books of this decade.” (Madison Smartt Bell)

“While Fountain undoubtedly knows his Graham Greene and Paul Theroux, his excursions into foreign infernos have an innocence all their own. In between his nihilistic descriptions, a boyishness keeps peeking out, cracking one-liners and admiring the amazing if benighted scenery.” (Cleveland Plain Dealer)

“So much of Fountain’s work...reads with an easy grace.... [S]ometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it’s just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.” (Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker)

“Here is a novel that is deeply engaged with our contemporary world, timely and timeless at once. Plus, it’s such fun to read.” (The Millions)

“The chasm between the reality and the glorification of war hasn’t been this surreal since Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.” (Sacramento Bee)

“…wickedly affecting…Billy Lynn has courted some Catch-22 comparisons, and they’re well-earned. Fountain is a whiz at lining up plausible inanities and gut-twisting truths for the Bravos to suffer through.” (Philadelphia City Paper)

“[A] wonderfully readable book [which] does something similar to Why Are We in Vietnam?, asking hard questions about the cultural short-sightedness that contributed to our involvement in Iraq. As a veteran myself, I can attest that it’s spot on.” (BookRiot)

“To call Fountain’s work enjoyable would be an understatement because it quite simply is one of the best novels written in the past five years.” (Texas Books in Review)

“The best book about the Iraq War and Destiny’s Child that you’ll ever read.” (Entertainment Weekly)

As a seventy year old woman who doesn't own a TV and lives in Maine, it's unlikely that a book about soldiers, football, and high rollers looking for a movie deal set in Texas would compel me to write my first review, but this book did. It's a piece of Americana that tells us about ourselves in the same way that say To Kill a Mockingbird or Death of a Salesman reveals pieces of the puzzle that is America. I somehow feel better for having read this book which is why, I guess, some of us read in the first place.

When I first heard about this book (and Karl Marlantes' blurb), I assumed it was written by a veteran - it isn't, and that's really amazing, because this is a pitch-perfect look into a soldier's experiences.

I say that as a veteran (of Desert Storm) and an embedded journalist in Iraq in 2007-09, so I have some first-hand knowledge with what he describes. To me, the voices and actions of the characters are dead-on accurate.

It's got some flaws, which I'll get to first so I can finish strong. In my mind, the flaws are because he's trying so hard at writing something big and memorable, and it gets away from him at times.

The conclusion veers into melodrama. Up until the last 40 pages or so, I could pretty much buy the events as possible real-life occurrences. But the end features a couple moments where I couldn't quite suspend disbelief.

While the civilians he describes behave realistically, there's times when it feels very much like the author's "meta rant" against the American mindset - he sets up some characters as one-dimensional straw men so he can show his disdain. I agree with what he's presenting, but it doesn't always feel like a story - more like he's trying to inject a point into the fictional narrative. Which is fine, but not if it's obvious like it sometime is.

Most of the time, the story is told in present-day perspective with some flashbacks. Very occasionally, he switches into describing the future, and that's awkward. For me, I would have liked no 'future look' at all.

So, okay, those things threw me off.

Everything else is very strong. Marlantes called it a "Catch 22" of the Iraq War - but that's not accurate, because to me it's not really a satire. Fountain isn't over-dramatizing events (except occasionally as I note), or exaggerating things for comic effect - it feels real, not deliberately over-the-top.

Billy Lynn and his fellow soldiers are often treated as props by the civilians they encounter - it might seem unlikely, but it's not. When I came back from Desert Storm, I was treated nicely, of course, but as a prop for the patriotic feelings for others - nobody cared about 'me,' but they did care about their opportunity to tell me how proud they were about America, my service, the troops, blah blah blah, and then I had to hear their two-cent opinion about every little tactical decision (I was a photographer who drove a Humvee - Gen. Schwarzkopf didn't keep me in his loop...). That disconnect comes across very accurately in Fountain's narrative.

This is what homecoming is like. So in the crazy situation that Fountain has put them in, the characters look for what's familiar - and that's their fellow soldiers.

The voice of those soldiers - all infantrymen - is spot on. This IS how infantrymen behave, especially when they're in a small group being gawked at. It's them against the world, and the fights they get into, arguments they have, flouting authority (but not their sergeant's), all ring very true.

Billy Lynn, the 19-year-old hero and main character, reminds me of some of the soldiers I met - very confident and self-assured, but not on a very deep level, like it wouldn't take much for the act to fall away. He's a hero you'll root for.

It's tough to describe the plot because I don't want to give things away. I think a reader should know not to expect some tragedy at the end that betrays your affection for the characters. There is a Hollywood subplot about a possible movie that's entertaining, and probably truthful, but I wouldn't know. A thinly-described parody of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is good for comic, and not-so-comic relief (he should have just named him). Obviously, a cheerleader comes into play.

Military readers should be aware of places they'll need to suspend disbelief - a Silver Star would take much longer to award than described here; I find it very hard to believe that the group of men would have to go back to Iraq at the conclusion of the "Victory Tour," and I wish Fountain came up with some kind of reason (even if contrived) to explain that; getting into fights in an Army dress uniform and then walking around afterwards and still look presentable would be very difficult.

But I really liked this story. I like any book that honestly tells a soldier's story. It's refreshing to read a book about the homecoming, or at least scenes at home, rather than another story that takes place in Iraq itself.

I think a military audience would really like this book, and will laugh and be annoyed at the right parts.

But I'm not sure the right civilian audience will ever read "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk." It's a solid reminder, even in fictional form, that soldiers are not props for our own conflicted feelings of feel-good patriotism, which is so rarely backed up by actual deeds or service. If people have nothing to offer returning veterans but, "you know, what we really should do in Iraq/Afghanistan is..." then they should say nothing at all.Read more ›

Plenty have summed up the plot of this book; if you've arrived at the Amazon page and are reading reviews, it's safe to say you know at least the rough outlines of the story. So I'll forego that....

A colleague of mine likes telling this story: his wife finally asks him what he's reading after he repeatedly laughs out loud. He replies to her, "A war novel." There's a bitterness that underlies it all, to be sure (see my back-and-forth with one of the one-star curmudgeons for more on that), but that bitterness is frequently offset by Fountain's hip, hilarious, dead on observations and wonderfully fresh cache of similes. Here are just a (very) few examples:

"She performed with a multitasky air of distractedness, like she was watering plants while talking on the phone..."

"She was still capable of sad, skewed smiles from time to time, forcing the cheer like Christmas lights in the poor part of town..."

"His complexion is the ruddled, well-scrubbed pink of an old ketchup stain..."

"Billy makes a few of the cheerleaders for strippers--they have the tough slizzard look of the club pro--but most of them could be college girls with their fresh good looks, their pert noses and smooth necks, their scrubbed, unsullied air of wholesome voluptuousness..."

"They're just so pretty and genuinely nice, and toned, good God, their bodies firm as steel belted radials...."

"Their wonderful breasts keep noodging up against his arms, setting off sensory bells and whistles like a run of bonus points in a video game..."

"Back in the locker room the players have almost finished suiting up. The air is a pungent casserole of plastics, b.o., farts, melon-woody colognes, and the rancid-licorice reek of petroleum liniments..."

"Then someone asks are we winning [the war in Iraq], and Billy gets passed around like everybody's favorite bong..."

"The fans around them are sheltering under blankets, umbrellas, here and there a plastic trash bag; only the Bravos sit there like stock in a pasture, wide open to the weather..."

If that's the kind of writing that constitutes "shallow," "boring," and "arrogant," then give me more! Well done, Ben Fountain. He raises terribly important questions about American society, but avoids the preachy cantankerousness of a jeremiad. A spoonful of sugar (a whole lot more here, actually) helps the medicine go down.Read more ›

Every war in the twentieth century has given us quality literature, some great, some not. "All Quiet on the Western Front, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Slaughterhouse Five, Catch 22, The Things They Carried" were great. "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" is not. But like all literature, "Billy Lynn" holds up a mirror to America and the image is chilling.

Billy Lynn and his fellow grunts in Bravo Team return to the states for a hero's welcome, only to be confronted by an America completely unfazed, totally uninvolved in the war. Like "All Quiet on the Western Front," "Billy Lynn" shows the puzzlement of troops who return from deadly battle only to see a complete disconnection in civilian society. America appreciates Bravo's efforts, politely expresses their support for the troops, but don't interrupt America's quest for materialism and pursuit of our right to happiness.

Ben Fountain draws an excellent portrait of America's ambivalence towards the Iraqi War, something that we've never seen before. In all other wars (except for the brief Desert Storm), our troops were primarily drafted, pulled reluctantly into harm's way. Families everywhere had someone or knew someone in the service. Casualties and deaths reverberated through communities reminding everyone that it could have been their son or nephew. It was this reverberation, the cry of mothers, which ended the Viet Nam War. Young men had no control over their lives. Authors explored the ancient Greek concept of determinism: how much of our lives are determined by things we cannot control, such as chance and the environment in which we live. Vonnegut developed these themes into his fatalistic view of life, as did Remarque, and Hemmingway developed an anti-war theme out of the chaos of the Great War, an insane war with no purpose.

But this war is different. Ours is now a small volunteer army; few families have sons or nephews in the war and there is little emotional reaction to the war, certainly nothing that impedes our pursuit of happiness.

Fountain begins his book by having his hero, Billy, essentially forced into the service and thus into the war. Fountain is best at bringing us into the emotion of a scene: Billy pulling his wounded sergeant from the gunfire, only to see the sergeant die in his arms. Then later the nineteen-year-old Billy envisions his sergeant's death face as often as he envisions sex. Or the scenes of the teasing flirtation with his sister, and later her overwhelming guilt from feeling responsible for his return to possible death in the war zone; the blunt, rude confrontation of his sergeant with the Jerry Jones character, the polite, politically correct Machiavellian. Fountain is at his worst when he breaks the narrator's voice, the voice of an enlisted grunt, and launches into a polemic, leftist diatribe, or, in several instances, lapsing into an academic voice with "inchoate" or literary criticism jargon such as "palpable," which completely break the narration. Occasionally the narration becomes didactic when he explains the story as if we won't understand it.

"Billy Lynn" is not great literature and we may not see any great literature come out of this eight-year struggle. But Fountain is absolutely correct: there is an American ambivalence toward this war, a lack of emotional concern for our neighbors' sons and nephews, and maybe it's because we don't personally know anyone in harm's way. There is no great groundswell of support for the war or any great voice of opposition. And that's scary.Read more ›

More About the Author

Ben Fountain has received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, a Whiting Writers Award, an O.Henry Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and two Texas Institute of Letters Short Story Awards, among other honors and awards. His fiction has been published in Harper's, The Paris Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Stories from the South: The Year's Best, and his nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times and The New York Times Sunday Magazine, among other publications. His reportage on post-earthquake Haiti was nationally broadcast on the radio show This American Life. He and his family live in Dallas, Texas.